Paterson, the latest Jim Jarmusch movie, is a quiet hymn to everyday life. In typical Jarmusch style, the film observes daily triumphs and setbacks as well as the poetry inherent in the smallest of details.
Paterson (Adam Driver) leads a simple, regular yet happy life as a bus driver in the small city of Paterson, New Jersey. The impressions he gets while driving his daily route provide inspiration for his poems which, despite encouragement from his wife Laura (Golshifteh Farahani), he does not want to publish. Laura’s world, by contrast, is in constant change. Every day she has new dreams and ambitions, and with Paterson’s support she attempts to realise them.
The flow of small events in Paterson is so nonchalant that you almost miss how ingeniously this movie is constructed – just as we are often blind to how much art and love dwells in unremarkable people with unremarkable houses and unremarkable lives. Paterson is both an ode to diversity and a testimony to the fact that, fundamentally, we are all the same.
New York film director Jim Jarmusch (1953) is one of the most successful independent American filmmakers of all time. Many of his wry films have become classics, in which the main characters are strangers in their own countries. Prompted by his latest film ‘Paterson’ (2016), the EYE film museum has reissued his classics in digitally restored cinema versions. At Movie W you can enjoy Jarmusch’s three best films: ‘Stranger than Paradise’ (1984), ‘Down by Law’ (1986) and ‘Dead Man’ (1995).